


The Problem of Afterlife

by Kat_o_nine_Tails



Series: DPH [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, And they watch over Harry, F/M, Ghost James Potter, Ghost Lily Evans Potter, James Potter & Lily Evans Potter Die, Samhain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22050733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat_o_nine_Tails/pseuds/Kat_o_nine_Tails
Summary: The night she died, Lily woke up with familiar arms holding her.A companion piece to The Wizard’s Nephew.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Series: DPH [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1587148
Comments: 25
Kudos: 197





	The Problem of Afterlife

**Author's Note:**

> It is recommended that you read The Wizard's Nephew along with this story, but if you want purely Lily and James' perspective of the events that are happening there, along with all of their confusion, it's not necessary.

Dying was surprisingly easy.

The moment before it happened, Lily had been scared, angry, resigned and hopeful, all at once. Scared of the monster in front of her. Angry at Peter, and Dumbledore and herself, for trusting any of them. Resigned that she was going to die, and that she had done all she could. Hopeful that the spell had worked. That if she had to die, at least it would mean her boy would live. 

Then the monster cast its spell, the green light blinded her, and then… Nothing.

It was not unlike taking that last breath before you fell asleep.

It seemed fitting, then, that the next bit felt like waking up.

As she drifted from nothingness into consciousness, the first thing Lily became aware of was that someone was holding her in an embrace, gently rocking. She knew those arms, and she knew that voice, and when she finally opened her eyes it was to a familiar face. 

“Lily?” James breathed in obvious relief, his arms going lax around her, “Thank Merlin, I thought you weren’t going to wake up.”

Lily’s head felt strangely foggy, though maybe that was just because of the mist that surrounded them. James helped her sit up and she rubbed her eyes in an attempt to clear them. “Where are we?”

“No idea,” James admitted with a grimace, “Last thing I remember is telling you to get Harry and go, and then… I was here. In the Afterlife, I guess.”

Those words slammed clarity into Lily’s head. James screaming, Harry crying, and Voldemort coming for her. Telling her to step aside, as if she would ever even _think_ about moving out of the way, just letting him take her baby.

_Her baby._

Lily jumped up to her feet, frantically looking around but there was nothing. Just an endless sandy landscape, the mist crawling close to the grey sand beneath them and no horizon to speak of. There was no one but her and James, and if Lily had been less anxious about her son, she would have found herself supremely unimpressed with the Afterlife.

As it was, it was a relief that Harry wasn’t there with them.

But neither was Voldemort.

“James?” 

“Yeah, I know,” her husband came up to her with an equally anxious look on his face, “I’m hoping Dumbledore came and stopped him, but…”

“But you know he couldn’t have,” Lily said. Maybe her spell hadn’t worked properly. She’d assumed Voldemort would simply cast the Killing Curse on Harry or try to break his neck, either of which would be enough to trigger the spell, and all the harm he tried to cause Harry would be turned back at him tenfold.

But Harry was a _baby,_ and the spell required magic or physical contact to activate _._ If Voldemort had somehow sensed what Lily had done, there was nothing stopping him from smothering Harry with a pillow.

Or picking him up in the sheets and taking him away. 

If Lily was still alive, she had no doubt she would be hyperventilating right then and there.

“Hey, hey Lils, look at me,” James shook her shoulders lightly, “Whatever happened, if we are really dead and Harry isn’t here, that means he’s still alive. There’s still a chance Sirius came in behind him and brained Voldy-shorts over the head with a chair.”

Despite herself, Lily let out a little huffing laugh at the mental image and James’ butchering of Voldemort’s name. 

“There, you see?” James smiled, and it barely looked strained, “That’s probably why the bastard isn’t here yet. He’s taking his time bleeding to death because he knows what’s waiting for him on the other side.”

“Well you’re partially right about that.”

Both James and Lily turned around in surprise at the unfamiliar voice. There was a short man standing where there had definitely been no one a second ago. Lily blinked at him in confusion, and a shared look with James confirmed it: whoever the man was, he wasn’t one of the hypothetical ‘loved ones’ that were supposed to greet them in the Afterlife.

“Who are you?” James asked bravely.

“No one important,” the man waved his hand nonchalantly, “Okay, fine, I am important, but not in the context of this particular narrative. And not for quite a few years yet, anyway.”

Lily and James looked at each other in bewilderment. What in the world was he talking about?

“But back to the point,” the man clapped his hands once, enthusiastically, “As you may have already figured out: Congratulations! You’re dead! Welcome... to the Other Side.”

He spread his arms wide, as if to show off the place they ended up.

“Yeah, that’s the important bit. You’re dead, and because of that, your kiddo lives,” James let out a rather undignified sound that was between a sob and a squawk. Lily’s feelings could be summed up with something similar.

Harry was _alive._

“Yes, yes, we know,” the unknown man waved his hand as if to hurry them along, “And that’s going to be reeeeeally important down the line, so that’s why I’m here to give you a rundown of-”

“BOSS!”

He was abruptly interrupted by yet another strange man, who was running towards them with a sheaf of papers clutched in his hands. As soon as he got there he thrust the papers towards the first man, who was apparently his ‘boss’, and who did not seem the slightest bit happy to see him.

“There’s been a complication, boss!” the newcomer, who was almost comically taller that his superior, pointed at something on the paper in near panic, “A divergence on the timeline. The possibilities have shifted more in favour of-”

He stopped abruptly when he spotted Lily and James, looking at them in horror.

Lily got the feeling that whatever was happening, it was important and they weren’t supposed to be there to witness it. So she stayed right where she was and glared back at him, just _daring_ him to try and shoo her away.

“Well, wadda ya know,” the shorter man, in contrast, was looking at the papers with a strange look of satisfaction, “Didn’t have him pegged as a family man. Not in this ‘verse, anyway. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, this is going to be interesting.”

“But- But, boss-!”

“Bup bup bup,” the Boss wagged his finger at his subordinate in mock reprimand, “This is out of your jurisdiction, rookie. Go back to- Whoever is your immediate supervisor at the moment and tell them everything is handled.”

“But-”

“Actually, now that I’m looking at it,” he turned the paper with exaggerated seriousness, “It’s not even your division. Tell you what,” he rolled up the papers and lightly smacked them on the newcomer's nose like he was a disobedient puppy, “I’ll take care of it _personally,_ and if you keep it quiet I won’t even tell your supervisors you screwed up. Now run along, Mandy.”

“My name is-”

“What did I just say?”

That shut the other one up, and even though he looked about as happy about it as a wet cat he nodded at his boss and simply… Blipped out of existence. Lily thought she could hear a strange flapping sound of his coat as he disappeared.

Apparition worked strangely in the Afterlife, she thought.

“Now then,” the Boss, apparently in charge of them now beyond just being a messenger of bad news, Vanished the papers and turned to them with a look Lily had come to associate with the Marauder’s more elaborate pranks, “While I personally know a few people who are going to lose their minds over this, this is actually very good news for you.”

“It is?” James asked doubtfully. Evidently, he didn’t know what just happened any more than Lily did.

“Oh, most certainly! If my borrowed underlings haven’t screwed up the projection calculations, we have just entered one of the few variations of the next decade that won’t result in tears after every visit.”

“Visit?” Lily cut in, feeling increasingly lost, “What visit?”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t get to that part,” the Boss cleared his throat dramatically, “Anyway, since you are both magical humans, after your death you fall under the jurisdiction of the Spirit Realm, which, in ten words or thereabout, means your souls are currently in a place quite a bit closer to the land of the living than your average Afterlife. It’s also quite fortunate that it was still Samhain when you died, that gives you a full 24 hours visitation window.”

“Visitation to what?” Lily stepped closer menacingly, “You still haven’t told us anything that makes sense! So start making sense, or I’ll make sense of you!”

“I’m getting to that, I promise!” the man held up his hands in surrender, though Lily got the feeling he was more amused that rightfully frightened of her, “You’ll probably figure it out as you go, but magical folks have a visitation clause: every year, on the day you died, you get to visit your loved ones on Earth.”

If her heart was still beating, it would have stopped in her chest at those words.

“Of course, there’s a catch,” the man shrugged apologetically, “While you get to go down on Earth and see whoever you want to see, it’s almost entirely a one-way deal. You can see the living, but they can’t see you, or hear you.”

That dashed her hopes a little bit, but not entirely. She would get to see Harry again, while he was alive. Even if it was only a day every year, she would get to see her son grow up. Maybe she wouldn’t see his first day of school, or hear about his first crush firsthand, but she would still get glimpses of his life, see him grow up.

It was more than she dared to hope for, when she had done the ritual that would take her life to protect his.

She felt an arm around her and a thumb rubbing at her cheeks, which was how she realised she was crying. But that was okay, because James was crying too but there was a smile on his face that mirrored hers.

“So,” James’ voice wobbled a little, “When do we start?”

“Next year, I’m afraid,” the man shrugged, “Samhain’s already passed. But I do know for a fact that other magical folks have already set up a schedule. You check out someone else’s folks and bring them back news, and they do the same for you on their visitation days. And yes, that does mean the Afterlife runs entirely on gossip, but to be fair, everything does these days.”

Lily let out a little laugh, her spirits lifted. The Boss smiled back at her and started leading them somewhere, so Lily and James followed. Slowly yet somehow all at once, the grey sands and mists turned into a hallway with doors on both sides, stretched into infinity. The sign on the arch above the entrance read _Wizarding Hall._ Someone evidently had a sense of humour around here.

“Here we are,” the Boss stopped and gestured at the door on their left. The little plaque read _James Potter & Lily Evans Potter, _“These are your rooms. James, your folks are a bit further down. Lily, I’m afraid-”

“Mine aren’t here,” Lily nodded in resignation, “Yes, I gathered that.”

The sign on the entrance said it all. Lily’s parents, who were both Muggles, were somewhere else. Likely somewhere without ‘visitation rights’, as the Boss put it.

Then something occurred to her. “We’re grateful for your help, but you never told us your name.”

That seemed to have brought him up short. He looked at Lily with his strange amber eyes like he was judging her very soul, and for the first time Lily got an inkling that this man wasn’t just a mere Not-so-Grim Reaper.

Then he smiled mischievously.

“Well m’lady, for the purpose of foreshadowing, you may call me Gabriel.”

And just like that, he disappeared with the same flapping sound, leaving Lily gaping after him in stunned silence.

“I’m going to assume that means something to you,” James told her with a blithe shrug, “Want to check out our new house?”

The ‘house’, as James put it, was a rather bizarre mix of her childhood home and the Potter mansion. She had her own room, as did James and they were both the exact replicas of their childhood bedrooms. There was another bedroom in between them with a king sized bed, looking almost exactly as the one they had hoped to move into after the war.

“As far as consolation prizes go, I wouldn’t turn this one down,” James remarked as he bounced on the bed. The slippers he had carelessly toed off immediately arranged themselves neatly at the foot of the bed.

While Lily couldn’t disagree that it was nice, there was still far too much on her mind to relax.

“Do you think he will be okay?” she asked plaintively. 

“Of course,” James didn’t have to ask who she was talking about, “This Gabriel guy, whatever he is, as good as said Voldy-shorts is gone. He’s probably being roasted over fire by demons as we speak, Harry’s got nothing left to worry about.”

“How do you know about demons and Hell, yet you have no idea who Gabriel is?”

“Don’t know about hell, but demons have to come from somewhere, and there is a reason demon summoning has been outlawed since before the Hogwarts founders were our age,” James said with fairly convincing nonchalance. He came up to her and hugged her fiercely. Lily hugged him back, sighing into his shoulder.

“He’ll be fine Lily, you’ll see,” James murmured into her hair, “No matter what this Gabriel says, Sirius is absolutely a family man. He and Remy’ll take good care of our little fawn.”

There was something nagging at Lily in the back of her head, but this place and James’ warm embrace were so lovely it didn’t seem that important at the moment.

So Lily closed her eyes and smiled. They would see Harry next year anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> So, like... I have no excuses. I'm at that point in The Wizard's Nephew where there is another time jump, and I'm having problems organizing the years so the events match the canon ones, but out of motherfucking nowhere my muse bangs me over the head with this and makes me write 2000 of a new story at 4 AM without my permission. But to be fair, this is actually a great way to get some outside perspective of the events of Snape's childhood and school years, so I threw my hands in the air and decided to make it a thing.
> 
> EDIT: Changed Witching Hall into Wizarding Hall, since it's more canon appropriate.


End file.
